Interview with drummer Nick Woj | By Janelle Jones

“We’re a hardcore band. We just experiment and put all [the] different experiments in our songs,” says Cold World drummer Nick Woj on their approach to making music. Their Deathwish release, How the Gods Chill, is pummeling hardcore with a hip-hop vibe.

Is How the Gods Chill a Danzig reference?!

[Laughs] Yeah, definitely.

You put out your first split in 2004. So this year is your 10th anniversary?

Yeah. It’s weird to think we’ve been around that long, but we’ve been pretty sporadic as far as releases and touring, so it went by pretty quick.

“Sporadic”?

We’ve always had members who lived pretty far apart from each other. In the beginning, it wasn’t like that; we were all from Wilkes-Barre, PA. Some of us lived in Philly, but that’s only two hours away. But it ended up as our current lineup: our singer lives in England, I live in Boston, our bass player lives in Phoenix, one guitar player lives in Wilkes-Barre, and the other in Detroit, so… I don’t know if there’s another band that spread out. It makes it pretty hard to get things done, so it takes a while.

The last full-length on Deathwish was 2008. What happened during the interim?

A lot of members moving and things like that. A couple of us have put out records with other bands, so we haven’t necessarily disappeared from the scene. It’s taken a long time for the record to come out. The record was kind of written and demoed so long ago. When you have people that spread out getting the little things done to get the record finalized, that was the biggest thing holding us back.

It comes out in August, so when were you in the studio recording it?

Almost two years ago now. [Laughs] The thing with us is there’s a lot of post-production ‘cause we have hip-hop parts and guest vocalists, so it’s hard to get people together to get that done. When you book time in a studio for a hardcore/punk band or an indie band, it’s an allotted time. You’re there until the record’s done, and then you’re not a priority, so it was hard to finish because they had other bands in the studio. That was part of it. Also, we had trouble with the vocals. Dan [Mills]’ voice kept blowing out, so we ended up recording the bulk of his main vocals while we were on the road, in hotel rooms.

Listening to the record, you can’t tell.

Well, our touring guitarist, Arthur [Rizk], he’s kind of a recording wizard, so having him on the road with us was a big help. He wanted to see the record get done, so he knew what had to be done as far as motivating Dan and bringing his little portable studio on the road with us, so that was a big help.

How did the guest appearances all come about?

I write all the lyrics for Dan. I show him the delivery of the lyrics as far as the vocal patterns, so some stuff I think maybe will sound better with someone else doing it, or someone like [guitarist] Alex [Russin] will write a song that I think will fit better with melodic vocals. Since Dan lives in England, sometimes we have George [Hirsch] from Blacklisted sing for us, so I had him sing a full song. Then I had a close friend of mine – Omar [Gonzalez] from Soul Search – sing a full song. I sang a full song, and then Alex sang a full song. Half the record, Dan isn’t singing. [Laughs] We just try to get creative with guest appearances, and it also helps since he’s so far away, it puts less of the vocal work on his shoulders.

Do you have tours planned? I saw you booked This Is Hardcore Fest. What will you do to support the record?

We’d like to do a full U.S. and a full Europe tour for the record, but it’s hard ‘cause not only does Dan live in England, but he also has three kids. It’s hard for him to get time to do more than a weekend. That’s why we’ll be doing more festivals, probably a West Coast weekend. This Is Hardcore we’ve been on every year that it’s happened, so it’s a no brainer to do it this year. And we’ll have some copies of the record for sale there, so that’ll be exciting since it’s a little before the release date. We’re talking to some other people about some other fests, but there’s no concrete plans for any major U.S. touring, although we’d like to.

Did you know from the beginning that you would have different elements than the run-of-the-mill hardcore band?

When we first came out, we wanted an early ‘90s Roadrunner Records melodic, more broad sound than a lot of bands in our scene were doing, to make it more listenable than a straight up hardcore record. Our favorite stuff is ‘80s N.Y. hardcore straight edge, Youth Crew hardcore, but we just didn’t see a need for that. It wouldn’t be exciting or fresh to anyone, so we decided to [add] some Life of Agony or Biohazard, those types of bands, maybe some mid-level Sepultura-vibe. Then that got popular in the scene. Not that we made it popular. We just always kept trying to do something creative that other bands weren’t doing. Also, we got into punk and hardcore before pop-punk got big. I listen to a lot of older punk and Brit-pop and things that most mosh-core bands now aren’t directly influenced by, so it’s easy to take influence from that, whether it’s song structure or lyrics or whatever. And that’s not even touching on the hip-hop side of things.

How did you get into punk and hardcore?

I got into punk through skateboarding and metal. Anybody 30 or older, that’s pretty much how you get into it. Or you get into Metallica, and James [Hetfield] had a Misfits shirt on, and you check them out or something like that. Thanks lists on records or Thrasher Magazine and stuff like that was very important. Pennywise was out then. I also would check out The Jam and The Damned and The Cramps and all the late ‘70s, early ‘80s punk, Discharge… So that’s how I got into punk, and then I just kinda stayed with it and got into hardcore and also stuff that might seem exotic to kids now like Morrissey or Type O Negative. That stuff was on MTV when I was a kid. Sonic Youth. [Those were] just normal things that I liked. I think people think they’re cool if they get into Sonic Youth now. I had my grandmother buy me Dirty on vinyl when I was a kid. So it wasn’t weird, it was a normal thing.

Sometimes people are very singular, and think you can like Morrissey OR you can like metal.

Yeah. That’s something I’ve run into [in] the hardcore scene, people [who] got into hardcore ‘cause they were looking for an identity, so they chose music. But maybe the best people who write hardcore and punk music are just into music in general. If they weren’t into hardcore, they’d be in a rock band or making hip-hop or something. I think it’s important [to] be into music in general, and not only into angry stuff. If you limit yourself like that, you lose the whole spectrum.

What influences your lyrics?

I draw a lot from personal things, but I write it to be sung by Dan. I’ve been realizing recently [that] I don’t know, if I was the one singing the lyrics, if they’d be the same lyrics. It’s not like I’m going through some poetry books. I write [knowing] it’s gonna be a Cold World song sung by Dan or Alex, so it is personal, but just kinda whatever’s on my mind just like any other hardcore/punk band.

Does Dan ever say, “I have to change this”?

No, he’s a lump of clay. [Laughs] Unfortunately, we can’t mold the tone of his voice. Kinda like an anchorman, whatever you put on the screen, he’ll read it.

Two songs seem more pensive: “Never” and “Find Your Way.” And they are on the record back-to-back…

We were always talking about how this album was the equivalent of Metallica’s The Black Album, because it was taking four years to record. [Laughs] We anticipated that early on, so we wrote a song that sounds like something on The Black Album. That’s what [“Never”] is. And that opening riff I had in my head, so I just mouthed it to Alex and he turned it into a real riff. Actually, I think I had the whole song mapped out as far as lyrics and how every riff went and I just mouthed it to Alex and he turned it into real musical notes. [Laughs] And that song’s about how in hardcore and punk, the bands and the fans are supposed to be [equals], but now that the Internet is out you hear every negative [thing] that everyone says about your band, so it’s a reaction to that: we are the same, but you don’t know how it feels to be on public display and criticized by everybody if you do something a little different. The song that follows it is about my ex-girlfriend. So I guess those are a little more personal. They also were written and demoed in the same session, so they had the same vibe.

Getting these hip-hop guys to contribute, had they heard of you before?

Meyhem Lauren, we worked with before. We did a song with a rapper called Sean Price, a 12” single, and on the b-side, we did a remix where instead of the hardcore song as the backing music, I used one of my beats and we got Meyhem Lauren and another rapper to do verses. And Meyhem Lauren was really cool and did it for free. We kept in touch and have talked every month or so since then, so he was excited to be on the record. I also wanted to give a little check since he did it for free. So that was cool. And he knew what hardcore was from growing up in N.Y., and he was involved in graffiti, so those worlds kinda crossover. Kool G. Rap, he’s an older guy, so he hasn’t heard of us, but he did a verse on an album by Unkle – which is DJ Shadow and this dude James Lavelle – and his verse was so awesome that I referenced it to him when I talked to him on the phone. I was like, “Just do what you did on that record,” and he knew exactly what I meant. So it was pretty cool to talk to my favorite rapper of all time.

Get your hands on Cold World’s How The Gods Chill here:
http://store.deathwishinc.com/category/cw.html

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